February, 1918 
11 
AN ARCHITECTURAL EPIGRAM 
The Possibilities and Limitations of the Small House, as Shown in “ The Hearth 
an English Cottage Designed by Bloodgood Tuttle, Architect 
C. MATLACK PRICE 
“ T HAVE not time,” said Madame de Stael, 
JL “to write you ten words . . . so I will 
write you ten pages.” With which keen jeu 
d’esprit the brilliant lady summed up once and 
for all the essential difficulty of the epigram. 
The problem is no less a test of ingenuity in 
architecture than in literature, for even aver¬ 
age ability can produce a reasonably good 
house of ample size: the good house of diminu¬ 
tive size requires more than average ability. 
In the large house there is plenty of room 
for mistakes, plenty of space to waste, usually 
plenty of money to cover all costs. By which 
I do not mean that large houses are usually 
bungled, but rather that a corridor which is 
not strictly necessary, a few superfluous square 
feet here and there, cannot mar the success of 
the large house, while a misplaced 6" may be 
very important in the plan of a small house. 
For a small house is neither a miniature 
model of a large house, nor a detached portion 
of a large house, but is a distinctly special 
problem in itself. That it is no less an oppor¬ 
tunity than a problem is a truth which has 
but recently been dawning upon architects. 
Small Houses and Architecture 
It is only fair to the architects, too, to say 
that the keenly competitive nature of their pro¬ 
fession, and the inevitable “cost of doing busi¬ 
ness” has made it largely impossible for them 
to lavish as much work on the small house as 
they would like to. The result has been that 
the small house has too frequently been culled 
by its prospective owner from a book of ready¬ 
made plans, or left to the uninspired hand of 
the contractor, whose idea of a plan has often 
seemed to consist of a large box, horizontally 
and vertically divided into eight equal com¬ 
partments called rooms. (Today, however, 
there are distinctions to be drawn as among 
contractors and their tastes, since the house 
shown here was built for a contractor!) 
Until recent years the small house of real 
architectural merit has been lamentably rare. 
The vicinity of Philadelphia for some years 
past has demonstrated, in several highly intel¬ 
ligent real-estate developments, that the small 
house may also be well designed, and it may 
be that we are on the threshold of an era of 
more general public appreciation of the distinc¬ 
tion between “architecture” and “building.” 
In appraising the small house as an archi¬ 
tectural design, the most natural beginning is 
Here, instead of accepting the commonplace that "all small houses are alike, excepting that some 
are worse than others,” the architect has said that some small houses may be better than others 
